One of my most memorable moments in graduate school was when Fredrik Barth — who I have a lot of respect for — came to give a talk to our department. The highlight for me was when he was describing how much he enjoyed spending time with people in Papua New Guinea during his fieldwork there. They were, he said, friendly and “the most wonderful shade of brown.” I think he was trying to be provocative and he succeeded — there was an audible gasp from the brown anthropologists in the room, as well as from pretty much everyone else.

And then there is Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf.

A friend of mine recently turned me on to this interview with him from Alan MacFarlane’s massive series of oral histories of anthropology. It’s worth a listen, since his fieldwork experiences seem completely INSANE to me and probably will to you too. His luck at going on a punitive expedition in northeastern India. His assurance to MacFarlane that burning down a village is not a big deal because ‘it was only made out of grass and bamboo’. The looting of human remains. And, probably my favorite, when MacFarlane asks CvF-H to rate the beauty of the different groups he’s studied with and CvH-F says that one group was not attractive because they were ‘darker’.

I’m not sure what to make of CvH-F’s career. He personally doesn’t seem like a bad person. But his career… what are we to make of it? is it a lesson in how far we’ve come, ethically, and anthropologists? Is it a lesson in how far we have to go? Am I wrong in thinking there’s something ethically problematic in accompanying government patrols in which villages are destroyed? 

I have no idea. I just personally feel like we will not be able to move forward as a discipline unless we understand our past. The deeper we understand it, the better. Rethinking our canon includes expanding it to include people like St. Clair Drake, as well as continuing to read about CvH-F. But mostly, listening to this interview my overall thought was: there are some things that are so INSANE your first thought is: blog first, ask questions later.

I only met Tambiah once, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Although Tambiah had taught there for only three years a quarter century ago, I was shocked by how well he was remembered. People — even the persnickety people who filled Chicago’s halls — were enthusiastic about his returning to the campus. I was voluntold (as they say) to organize a dinner for him to have with the graduate students. It ended up being an incredibly punishing task for me, I had to find the restaurant where we would eat and drive Tambiah there. Problems began immediately: we were given ‘more money than usual’ to take him out, but not enough to actually take him out somewhere nice. I had no car, had not driven regularly in a decade, and had never driven in a big city like Chicago. The department secretary lent me hers (yes, Chicago people, another good deed by Herself) and I had ended up navigating traffic, sweating profusely, with a Luminary sitting contentedly in the car with me.

Throughout all of this, one of the biggest problems was Tambiah himself. Although I attempted to cater to his needs, this proved almost impossible: in his presence I could do nothing wrong. Any kind of food would be acceptable. It didn’t matter if we got to the restaurant on time. We could have wine, or not, depending on what the students preferred. He was more interested in what we were studying than his own work. Gracious, quiet, and polite, Tambiah was almost too much of a gentleman. So you can see: I don’t study Buddhism, South Asia, or Southeast Asia, so I feel like I am not the right person to write a remembrance of him. But until a fuller appreciate comes along, this is what I will try to do.

The outlines of Tambiah’s career have been convered by most of the googleable sources: he was born in 1929 in the Christian community in Sri Lanka and grew interested in anthropology there. He eventually found his way to Cornell, an area studies center, and earned a Ph.D. in 1954 by writing a dissertation on peasant communities in what was then Ceylon. After graduating, Tambiah began doing work with UNESCO in Thailand (1960-1963), and he eventually became a specialist in this area.

Tambiah worked with many anthropologists on his Ph.D. (Lauriston Sharp, Morris Opler, etc.) in the course of his Ph.D., which dealt with issues raised by Robert Redfield. But I think a real turning point in his intellectual development came in 1963, when he began a ten-year stint as a reader of anthropology at Cambridge. It was there that he became influenced by Edmund Leach. At this point in his career Leach had finished up Pul Eliya, his ethnography of Sri Lanka, and was turning towards Lévi-Strauss. Leach was producing the essays that would later go into Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, and edit The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. I think we can see Leach’s influence on Tambiah in Tambiah’s essays on classification, ritual, magic, and symbolism.

In 1973 Tambiah came to the University of Chicago, as I mentioned, where he taught for three years. I think these years were also highly influential for him, since he helped contribute to the University’s strength in South Asian studies and conveyed a sense of the social-anthropological encounter with structuralism. At the same time, I think Tambiah was influenced by the linguistic-anthropological focus at Chicago, and American versions of symbolic anthropology. This influence is evident in his 1985 volume of collected essays Culture, Thought, and Social Action. His Morgan lectures of the previous year were eventually published in 1990 as Magic, Science, and Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Tambiah’s project was, roughly, to understand how it was that ritual was efficacious — this meant understanding how words did not just describe the world, but change it (how they were ‘performative’). It also meant understanding how people deployed classificatory systems and cosmologies in the course of everyday life, and how those shaped action. At the time, Tambiah was one of the many people creating what Sherry Ortner would call, in 1984, ‘practice theory’ by examining how cultural categories were used in action. He never achieved the fame of Victor Turner or Marshall Sahlins — I think he was too interested in ethnography to engage in high-level theorizing. What commanded attention was his powerful ethnographic analysis: not what he said about theory, but how he employed it. He would take this awareness of the cultural/symbolic/cosmological dimension of action with him to his analysis of the religious dimensions of ethnic tensions and mass actions in South Asia.

In 1976 Tambiah moved to Harvard, where he worked until he retired in 2001. There, his interest turned back towards South Asia and ethnic violence, a long-standing preoccupation of his. He produced books in 1986, 1992, and 1996 on this subjects, working in both Sri Lanka and India. As he grew closer to retirement he also began work memorializing Edmund Leach, producing an exhaustive biography of his teacher in 2002.

As I said, I don’t feel confident about my ability to speak about Tambiah’s work in South or Southeast Asia. But if you are interested in learning more about Tambiah, I highly recommend watching Alan MacFarlane’s 1983 interview with Tambiah. The good people at HAU have made one of his most well-known pieces, “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia” available in golden (completely free to read) open access — an important way to salvage his legacy, since much of his work was published in obscure journals and collected in edited volumes that are not easily (or cheaply) accessible. I would also recommend Tambiah’s memoir of Edmund Leach, which is, frankly, so well-done that it is the only thing you will ever need to read about Leach, a small masterpiece of rigorous intellectual history. For those of you with access to Culture, Thought, and Social Action, I’d recommend… well, really there aren’t any bad essays in that book. But “A Performative Approach to Ritual”, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit”, and “On Flying Witches and Flying Canoes” are good places to start.